Born
in Philadelphia in 1947, James Morrow spent his teenage years in
Hillside Cemetery, not far from Philadelphia. While such an
adolescence might bespeak a morbid frame of mind, in Jim’s
case the
explanation lies in his passion for 8mm moviemaking. Before going off
to college, he and his friends used graveyard locales in a half-dozen
short horror and fantasy films, including The
Revenge of the Monster Maker, Cagliostro the Sorcerer,
and two literary adaptations, The
Ancient Mariner and The
Tell-Tale Heart.

After
receiving degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard
University, Jim channeled his storytelling drive into the production
of prose fiction. His first such endeavor, a Vonnegutian fable titled The
Wine of Violence,
was called “the best SF novel published in English in the
last ten
years” by the American
Book
Review. He followed this
utopian satire with The
Continent of Lies, a comedic
meditation on what is now called virtual reality. The
author’s
breakout novel was a satire on the nuclear arms race, This
Is the Way the World Ends,
which became a Nebula Award nominee and the BBC’s choice as
the
best SF novel of the year. His next dark comedy, Only
Begotten Daughter, chronicled
the escapades of Jesus Christ’s divine half-sister in
contemporary
Atlantic City. It shared the 1991 World Fantasy Award with Ellen
Kushner’s Thomas the
Rhymer.

Throughout
the 1990’s Jim devoted his literary energies to killing God,
an
endeavor he pursued through three interconnected novels. The first
book of the Godhead Trilogy. Towing
Jehovah, winner of the World
Fantasy Award and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, recounts
the
efforts of a supertanker captain to bury the two-mile-long corpse of
God. Blameless in Abaddon,
a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, finds a small-town,
small-time Pennsylvania magistrate putting God on trial for crimes
against humanity. In The
Eternal
Footman, a “plague of
death
awareness” descends on humankind after God’s skull
goes into
geosynchronous orbit above Times Square.

Having
grown sick of his Creator, and vice-versa, Jim next attempted to
dramatize the birth of the scientific worldview. The resulting
historical novel, The Last
Witchfinder, tells of Jennet
Stearne, who makes it her life’s mission to bring down the
1604
Parliamentary Witchcraft Act. Janet Maslin, writing in the New
York Times, praised this loopy
epic for fusing “storytelling, showmanship and provocative
book-club bait ... into one inventive feat.” Jim followed The
Last Witchfinder with a
thematic sequel, The
Philosopher’s Apprentice,
relating the adventures of a failed philosophy student hired to
implant a conscience in a mysterious young woman whose brain is a tabula
rasa.
Reviewing The
Philosopher’s
Apprentice on NPR’s Fresh
Air, Maureen Corrigan called it
“an ingenious riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,”
adding, “hold on tight and enjoy the giddy thrills.”

Other
recent projects by Jim include a set of Tolkien Lesson Plans, written
in partnership with his wife, Kathy. Aimed at secondary-school
teachers who want to bring The
Hobbit and The
Lord of the Rings into their
classrooms, this nine-unit curriculum is featured on the Houghton
Mifflin website. Another Jim and Kathy collaboration appeared in
April of 2007, The SFWA
European
Hall of Fame, which
anthologizes sixteen Continental science fiction stories, each
rendered carefully into English via a three-way Internet conversation
among the author, the translator, and the editors.

Jim’s
contributions to the short fiction field also include a Nebula
Award-winning story “The Deluge,” collected in Bible
Stories for Adults; the
occasionally produced one-act play “Come Back, Dr.
Sarcophagus,”
collected in The
Cat’s
Pajamas; and the Nebula
Award-winning novella, City of
Truth. Tachyon Books has
recently published the latest Morrow novella, Shambling
Towards Hiroshima, set in 1945
and dealing with a U.S. Navy scheme to leverage a Japanese surrender
via a biological weapon that strikingly anticipates Godzilla.

A
full-time writer, James Morrow makes his home in State College,
Pennsylvania, along with his wife, Kathryn, son, Chris, and enigmatic
sheepdog, Molly. When not endeavoring to craft adequate fiction, he
pays intermittent attention to his family, savors his DVD collection
of vulgar biblical spectacles, and plays with the Lionel electric
trains running around in his attic.